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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28137315">Whether Bad Luck or Sorrow Comes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxwine/pseuds/Foxwine'>Foxwine</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Back to the Fold [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Overwatch (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon, Brainwashing, Gen, Partial Nudity, Unreliable Narrator, implied past sexual assault, mention of Sombra</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:14:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,553</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28137315</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxwine/pseuds/Foxwine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Widowmaker does not remember ever having been a morning person.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Back to the Fold [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1180190</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Whether Bad Luck or Sorrow Comes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>All of the stories in the Back to the Fold series can be read separately, however, they all exist on the same timeline.<br/>Chronologically, this is the earliest of the Back to the Fold fics so far, set a few years after Overwatch was shut down, long before the Recall went out.</p><p>As always, I'm forever indebted to my beloved partner Demolition, who holds my hand when the characters won't cooperate and viciously pokes holes in my plots in equal measure, and without whom my writing would be sorely lessened.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Whether Bad Luck or Sorrow Comes</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>A shift in the air currents woke her. Someone else had entered the room. She lay still, waiting.</p><p>“It’s half an hour past the time you should have been up,” the intruder growled at her, rough and rasping. “Which is what having your alarm in the room with you rather than leaving it stuffed between the couch cushions is supposed to prevent.”</p><p>So it had been found, then. She didn’t like sleeping in a room that she knew contained any electronics. It felt unsafe, and given how few feelings she had, she paid full attention to those she had left.</p><p>He moved closer, behind her where she lay on her side. “I can tell that you’re awake.”</p><p>His proximity made her skin crawl. It was only a matter of time before he would lay hands on her.</p><p>She shifted, grumbled out a wordless almost-sigh of sound, turned over, stretched luxuriously, then lashed out as quick as a thought and slammed her foot right through his face.</p><p>It was supremely dissatisfying, the lack of resistance against the blow leaving her nothing but a hollow emptiness, and she already had enough of that.</p><p>He folded his arms across his chest, waiting for his head to re-form.</p><p>“If this is how you always react to being woken up, no wonder that no one wants to do it,” Reaper growled, his current lack of a jaw or a face somehow no hindrance to his speaking.</p><p>Then again, she had once seen him speak when he was nothing more than a seething cloud of black dust, so it should have been no surprise even if she could still access the emotion.</p><p>“If they are stupid enough to get so close, that is the reaction,” she snapped at him, her tone waspish. People were so much easier when she was looking at them through her scope than when they were in the same room.</p><p>Enough of his head had re-formed that she could tell when he tilted it to the side. “My mistake,” he said, and unexpectedly drifted backward until he was well out of arm’s reach of the bed. “I apologize, <em>madame</em>.”</p><p>She stared at him. His response was outside of protocol; no one ever apologized to her, let alone used any other title than Widowmaker when addressing her. He was not one of her handlers, though. Not even a member of Talon, really. A small amount of thought revealed that there were no protocols in place for such a situation. She decided, with a faint, dull thrill, to do nothing about it.</p><p>In staring at him, she also noticed that he looked different. Except for the claws on his gloves and the studded belt around his waist, the majority of the metal and ornamentation that was part of his usual outfit was gone, along with his long coat, leaving him in rather ordinary black military-style boots, pants, and what appeared to be a black leather hoodie, of all things.</p><p>Just then, the actual shape of his head clarified under his hood as it finished reforming.</p><p>“You are not wearing your mask,” Widowmaker said with faint surprise.</p><p>Reaper shrugged. “A very firm suggestion was made for me to ‘dress down and get comfortable’.” His jaw didn’t move as he spoke, his tone somewhere between sarcastic and amused.</p><p>“Your head is a skull,” she observed. “<em>Pourquoi est-ce?</em>”</p><p>The dull red lights within the eye-sockets of the skull flickered, like a blink. “Why not?” Reaper asked. “It’s my skull.”</p><p>“It would have to be, <em>non</em>?” She rolled up into a seat, crossing her legs and settling her spine upright one slow vertebrae at a time, until she was sitting up perfectly straight, her shoulders rolled back.</p><p>The motion of rolling her spine in such a way was a thing that she had from Amélie. It and the twinge of a suppressed habit every morning when she woke. Amélie had smoked. It had not been a desirable vice in a Talon weapon. Just as well, given that Widowmaker had to be very careful of just how much of Amélie she allowed herself.</p><p>Before missions it was the hardest. During there was nothing but what Widowmaker was, and After there was only the glow of the kill. But Before, or the more rare Between, that was where the problems lay, where the questions of where or whether the line between what had been Amélie’s and what was Widowmaker’s began to arise.</p><p>Widowmaker had been Amélie once, but Amélie could never be Widowmaker, which was why she must be Widowmaker and not Amélie. Why she must be careful, so careful, not to be Amélie again.</p><p>Reaper’s skull turned to track her movement. So, he could still see despite his lack of eyes.</p><p>The steady, unwavering stare of those near-empty eye-sockets reminded her that she had gone to bed wearing only a very brief pair of athletic shorts that barely covered her and nothing else. It had been too hot for more clothes. She always seemed to be too warm, even in winter.</p><p>There were no protocols in place. He was not one of her handlers.</p><p>“Enjoying the view, <em>monsieur</em>?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him and refusing to draw an arm across her bare breasts.</p><p>“Not particularly.” Reaper shrugged yet again and settled his weight back on his heels. “Lavender, while a lovely colour for clothes, is not so attractive when it’s a shade of skin.”</p><p>Widowmaker glanced down at her purple-tinged limbs, trying to remember when it had been that her skin had changed. It was difficult, with the uncertainty of the passage of time and the vague, unfocused nature of any of her medically-related memories.</p><p>She was fairly certain that it had happened during one of the times that she had been awake for an extended amount of time between missions, somewhere around the time she had started to always feel too warm. She did have a clear memory of the Doctor calling the new colour of her skin ‘an unforeseen side effect’ and telling her not to concern herself about it, so she had not.</p><p>“Then you should not stare,” she said haughtily, turning her face away from Reaper, but being careful to keep him in her peripheral vision.</p><p>“Was there something else in here worth staring at?” Reaper’s head turned, sweeping his gaze across the single bed, the wardrobe, the bedside table and lamp, and the closed floor-to-ceiling curtains that disguised that the single window was rather under-sized and possessed of a very uninspiring view.</p><p>When he turned back, his face stayed angled slightly away from her.</p><p>Confusion was not something she was allowed to indulge in, so she extended her left leg and began her morning stretches. It was less than ideal to perform them on a bed, but there wasn’t enough room on the floor, even when such a large amount of the available space wasn’t being occupied by Reaper.</p><p>There was silence for a time as she folded her torso down along her outstretched leg, first to the side and then along her front. It was not an uncomfortable silence, oddly. Not like when her handlers watched her at all.</p><p>“Why are you still here?” she asked as she switched legs. “<em>Regarde</em>, I am awake.”</p><p>He didn’t answer right away. She had finished stretching over her right leg and had moved on to having them both outstretched in front of herself before he spoke.</p><p>“Sombra says you’ve been visiting graves.”</p><p>Widowmaker paused for longer than usual, folded perfectly in half, staring down at her own legs.</p><p>“Sombra says a lot of things,” she said as she straightened up.</p><p>It was a message, of course. Anything and everything involving Sombra was a message. The question was just whose message it was: whether Reaper was letting her know that he and Sombra were in contact outside of the contracts that Talon hired him for, or if Sombra had used the mercenary to warn Widowmaker that she had been observed. Or it was possible that it was both. Reaper did not strike her as someone prone to wasting time or effort without having a reason.</p><p>“Is it a lie, then?” Reaper asked, cocking his head.</p><p>Widowmaker considered her answer. It was a unique position, to be able to choose for herself what she would say from the full range of options from a full lie all the way to the naked truth. Something that Amélie would have done every day of her life and yet wholly Widowmaker’s.</p><p>“Only in scale,” she answered, deciding that she should feel generous.</p><p>Widowmaker had only been visiting one grave, after all.</p><p>She had found that there were certain small freedoms. Talon did not particularly care about her getting herself tattooed so long as the timing didn’t interfere with missions, and after the first one they hadn’t bothered to send an escort with her. She had found that she could wander, to an extent, and that so long as she always returned within the day she could take as circuitous a path back from where she had been as she liked.</p><p>The first trip to the grave of Gerard Lacroix had been a cautious, testing one. Amélie had loved her husband very much; Widowmaker had been prepared to possibly be overwhelmed with her grief for him. But she had been feeling particularly empty at the time, awake too long without a mission. So she had sought out the grave of her first kill, hoping for an echo of the satisfaction, the feeling of being truly alive, that performing a successful assassination gave her.</p><p>Instead, there had been nothing. No grief, no love, none of the joy of the kill. Not even a hollow. Just Widowmaker and a carved stone that happened to be in a cemetery.</p><p>There had been something appalling in the nothingness. There should have been something — if not an echo of Amélie, then some sense of the kill. It was never as strong as revisiting the actual site was, but Widowmaker had gotten echoes of the feeling before from attending the funerals or visiting the graves of other targets.</p><p>There should have been something there, at the grave where Gerard and Amélie lay together.</p><p>She returned whenever she was awake between missions in Paris, just to confirm that the complete lack of any feeling still occurred. She had never noticed any observers. Though that seemed to be little impediment to Sombra.</p><p>Reaper nodded slowly. She sensed that she had possibly revealed more with her answer to his question than she had thought she was.</p><p>She studied Reaper, still carrying a thick aura of danger around him even is his current ‘casual’ state, his weight settled back on his heels and his silver claws ticking idly on his bicep. She did not think he was one to take tales back to her handlers — if he had wanted them to know, he would have relayed his message in front of them, not taken the opportunity of their being alone with each other. This was good. If stories of her visiting Gerard’s grave were repeated to the Doctor she would assume that the reason arose from a sentimentality that Widowmaker was not supposed to have. She would want Widowmaker to be reconditioned again to excise it.</p><p>Widowmaker would prefer to avoid that eventuality. Reconditioning left gaps in her, empty places where things she no longer knew were supposed to be. An unbalance within, leaving her awkward and ungainly in her own mind.</p><p>Still, Reaper had been unexpectedly accommodating, almost kind, in a way that her handlers never were. She could perhaps risk a little.</p><p>“Why bring this to me?” she asked, pressing the soles of her feet together and drawing them in toward her torso. “It can hardly be a concern of yours.”</p><p>Reaper tilted his head and swivelled a shoulder, popping the joint. “You and Sombra are the only ones Talon has ever sent to work with me that are capable of thinking for yourselves,” he said. “So when one of the only two people Talon has who can carry out a mission and not just follow orders warns me that the other is close to getting caught doing things that will get her brain microwaved if she’s found out, I find myself getting concerned.”</p><p>It was, by far, the longest speech she had ever heard Reaper give.</p><p>Thoughtfully, she continued her stretches, flattening her knees to the bed and folding her torso down over her feet, her arms over her head.</p><p>“I believe that I am flattered,” she mentioned.</p><p>There was a test for her in the answer he had given. It had exposed him, and the Talon Sombra too. Just a small amount. They were in contact, those two, outside of the missions that Talon hired the mercenary for.</p><p>And the member of Sombra that was with Talon was concerned about her. That would take some thinking about. They went out of their way to be a presence, of sorts, to Widowmaker, communicating mainly in cryptic symbols and vague messages. A few words added into a written mission brief in a different font, vibrantly coloured sugar-skulls that sometimes floated in the edge of her vision when she activated her helmet, random people coming to her saying ‘the Sombra said I should tell you’ or ‘Sombra thinks you should know’. Nothing direct, nothing face-to-face, just reminders that they were a presence in Widowmaker’s existence, that they hadn’t gone away or forgotten her.</p><p>It had not occurred to Widowmaker that the Sombra would care about her being reconditioned. Especially not enough to have brought it up with a third party.</p><p>She wondered why that might be, and wished that she knew either of the two well enough to know whether the evocative phrasing of ‘get her brain microwaved’ came from the hacker or the mercenary.</p><p>Either way, it was strangely nice, the feeling of being more than just a tool. The Doctor had told her that there was pride in being the perfect tool, and Widowmaker was proud, but suddenly she had found a pleasure in someone not seeing her as just to be used.</p><p>Out of sight from her current position, Reaper shifted audibly with a creak of leather. “We understand each other, then,” he said.</p><p>Widowmaker straightened and unfolded herself, sliding off of the bed to stand and give herself a full-body stretch, rising up on her toes with her arms above her head, then shaking out her limbs one by one.</p><p>There was no room for friendship in her. That required far more trust, more emotion than she could ever possess, even for someone outside the protocols that otherwise dictated every interaction, the type and tone of every response she gave.</p><p>However, she was not just a tool to him. She was worth testing, worth making the most preliminary moves of offering an allegiance, rather than using and then discarding her until she was needed again.</p><p>Heady thoughts, new and intoxicating.</p><p>Without her conscious will, Widowmaker’s lips curved up into the very faintest of smiles. An ally. Hers, not Talon’s, not Amélie’s, but Widowmaker’s. Such a thought. Such a future to consider, having something for herself.</p><p>“<em>Oui</em>,” she said, savouring the possibility. “<em>Certainement.</em>”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The title is a reference to an old French saying which translates to "A spider in the morning for sadness, a spider at midday for anxiety, a spider at dusk for hope.", and also a voice-line of Widowmaker's in the game that is a play on the traditional wording, which translates to "Morning spider, bad luck. Evening spider, nightmare."</p></blockquote></div></div>
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